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122546-have-the-farming-bots-been-eradicated
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Think Eko was PvE, so yes you will have been moved to Jabbit | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- This is my bet as well. Most of the supermegaevilcorporation gold farm bots probably moved to ArcheAge, and Carbine karate chopped the remaining lower classed farm bots. | |} ---- Actually this is a little unfair. The two-factor authentication system has done a lot to reign in the low-hanging fruit of hacked accounts for the farmers. | |} ---- Also, Carbine did do SOMETHING. We had a huge shuddering halt to a lot of gold farm activity there, and it never recovered. Now, if Wildstar was as big as WoW, they'd still be here trying, but everything's on a sliding scale. RMTs have to balance how much gold they can sell versus how much they can make, and then compare that with how hard it takes to get it. A combination of factors contributes here: -CREDD essentially puts a ceiling on the price. No RMT can sell plat for more than 10 plat for 20 dollars, otherwise the CREDD system undercuts them and is legal. Also, just having a legit option for this means people might not even think of calling an RMT. -Carbine did something that made it exceptionally hard to telehack in the game. I have an idea of what they did, but you saw evidence of it in shuddering NPCs and platforms for a while. Levels on mining nodes and new changes to deposits (specifically the vendor prices, not the bug that's causing them to spawn materials so slowly) are also making it hard to grind money for sale. When they also can't really break enough 2FA accounts to make hacking a higher level worth it, it drives up the investment they need just to operate. -There simply aren't as many people here to buy plat. A lot of things are behind game-ground, untradable currencies, not platinum. Now, plat has a lot of uses, but it won't buy you any of that new glory gear, or most of the rep-bound stuff. Add to that the game's population a few months back almost bottoming out, and there just wasn't enough money ready to be thrown at the game. The people that were around were either selling CREDD or making plat themselves. So, essentially, they couldn't sell plat at a decent enough price to make it worth getting around Carbine's countermeasures where people would buy it. They can't compete effectively with CREDD in these conditions with this market. That's driven some of the larger RMTs to something where that balance is lower. Carbine's not bulletproof, and if any of those factors changes, we might see more around than we do, but for now Wildstar is just a less attractive target than its contemporaries, which could be better populated, easier to crack, and unregulated. We will see if things stay that way; with deposits on plots becoming harder to farm, we may see them in the open world again if rumors that they lived turning circles on housing plots are true. | |} ---- As a CREDD buyer, 10 plat is a paltry sum for $20. (But real close to my uh-nope threshold). The last time I saw an RMT ad it was significantly cheaper. The process of buying CREDD to put on the IG market it somewhat inconvenient. I think there's a 20+ hour delay between purchase and the ability to sell. Obviously the legitimate route has its benefits like not having to go to the virus-laden skeevy parts of the Intertubes. I fail to see how only changing mining nodes and pooching the level ranges so that people at level in zone can't scratch them is considered "working as intended". As an anti-bot measure it's completely ineffective! The low lifes that run RMT operations have the resources (and the slave labor) to powerlevel. So this change is a win for the bots and a big middle finger for legitimate crafters. | |} ---- I think you're missing the point here, so I bolded it. You're thinking like a player, not a business. "Have the resources" means that it requires resources, resources which will cost time and/or money. You said it yourself, and those resources are exactly why the first part I bolded isn't applicable. The more resources it takes to run these (and recall that, once a bot is compromised, it will be inactivated, temporarily or permanently, meaning it generates no money and makes the investment completely worthless). Resources that drive up that first price, which cannot rise higher than the price of CREDD. Using telehacking level 1s, people on trial accounts, or hacked accounts to generate as much plat as fast as possible requires no resources. The price can be cheap. At most, investment in breaking existing accounts without 2FA consists of purchasing lists of usernames and passwords gained from other websites, rapid firing them at the server in however many permutations you need to see what sticks, and logging in on them to run a telehacking or botting script. That's not cheap, but it's a lot harder than just being able to create a level 1 and bounce them around. It takes a lot more resources to run up a character to 35 then, without telehacking, run a script in the open world to gather nodes on the ground. It's not impossible, and yes, some RMTs have the resources to do it, but it immediately means a much more complicated and less profitable organization. Literally, RMTs may not have the resources to do this, and those that do may find those resources better spent elsewhere. That's the entire point of having a security system. Nothing's unbreakable, it just has to be proportionally harder to break than the next guy down the street. The second more resources are needed to get the same amount of plat, the price rises. Coupled with lower demand and legitimate alternatives, yes, this works. You will also notice platforms don't stutter anymore... | |} ---- How much do you know about the RMT trade? I wasn't kidding when I mentioned slave labor. Yes these organizations turn a profit even if they have to pay for subscriptions and they know how to launder the plat so that they only lose their front accounts and not the farmer accounts. The only thing they depend on is a game popular enough to attract people desperate enough to give them money. | |} ---- Yes, but they're also businesses. If it takes you two slaves three days to make a level 50 to make any money, which is then deleted if it's swept up, forcing them to start over from the beginning. If there's a game that takes even two slaves two days, but has more demand, they go there. It is an unsavory business, but it's a business nonetheless. Right now, they can make more money from more people who have no legitimate alternatives at less cost in WoW, and they will. You can't manufacture demand for a product and artificially make it worth selling. Any of these measures, low population, better security, low demand, might be overcome, but the combination of all three doesn't make this a very profitable venture. If anything, it certainly limits how many RMTs are in this game. The margins are a lot thinner here. And they'll do WHATEVER it takes to not need subscriptions. You can launder, but they will eventually catch your accounts. That's why RMTs prey so heavily on hacking accounts and go to great lengths (and spend a lot of money) to avoid subbing, because to start a subscription in this game, even now, costs 40 dollars to kick off and 15 dollars a month thereafter. Not a lot, but if you're talking about any of those getting found and booted in a week (not an inordinate amount of time if you leave the actual bots running long enough to trace the money, because that's a lot easier), you end up costing 55 dollars in startup every time someone needs to use it. That's enough money, no joke, that they would rather pay people to chain-hack Wildstar fan sites, Enjin, anything to get around paying it. RMTs aren't a magic business; they're often highly illegal in practice, but that's because just starting a character, raising them legitimately, and then being blacklisted and starting again is so expensive that it's not worth doing with any armature. You would need a large and particularly sophisticated operation to do it in Wildstar, especially since there aren't things like flying mounts. I actually know quite a bit about them (I wrote a final essay in my finance classes about them, so I read a lot on the subject a few years back). While they're collectively a fairly large business, it's a crowded marketplace and that money isn't split up equally. That's not to say they aren't actively trying to sell plat in this game, but that it's a lot easier to buy it and characters from players who are leaving and sell it back at a markup. Wildstar's demand isn't nearly high enough to make volume operations profitable, not when you can spend that same time in WoW and make more money with less cost via the same methods. | |} ---- ---- ---- No Naix, I left becuase Blizzard - Activision have turn WoW into a money milking cow. They really have turned there attention from the game. Massive lack of content, the main one for me was the killing off of the trades! I couldn't play an MMO without trades! Locking everything behind daily cool downs just so you log in everyday.... Taking alot of content out and passing it off as new content! You can tell they really want to kill WoW off and concentrate on there new projects Heroes of the storm - Overwatch. The amount of content that Wildstar has implimented and changed since release, Blizzard would make you pay £30 for! | |} ---- Thank You! So sorry for stirring the nightmares again! :P | |} ----